Taken together, the candidacies of Trump, Sanders, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz represent a rejection of the establishment. Then this is a rejection election

With the Iowa caucuses a week away, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, who leads in all the polls, is Donald Trump.

The consensus candidate of the Democratic Party elite, Hillary Clinton, has been thrown onto the defensive by a Socialist from Vermont who seems to want to burn down Wall Street.

Not so long ago, Clinton was pulling down $225,000 a speech from Goldman Sachs. Today, she sounds like William Jennings Bryan.

Taken together, the candidacies of Trump, Sanders, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz represent a rejection of the establishment. And, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, other Republican campaigns are now channeling Trump’s.

This then is a rejection election. Half the nation appears to want the regime overthrown. And if spring brings the defeat of Sanders and the triumph of Trump, the fall will feature the angry outsider against the queen of the liberal establishment. This could be a third seminal election in a century.

In the depths of the Depression in 1932, a Republican Party that had given us 13 presidents since Lincoln in 1860, and only two Democrats, was crushed by FDR. From ’32 to ’64, Democrats won seven elections, with the GOP prevailing but twice, with Eisenhower. And from 1930 to 1980, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress for 46 of the 50 years.

The second seminal election was 1968, when the racial, social, cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and Vietnam War, tore the Democratic Party asunder, bringing Richard Nixon to power. Seizing his opportunity, Nixon created a “New Majority” that would win four of five presidential elections from 1972 through 1988.

What killed the New Majority?

First, the counterculture of the 1960s captured the arts, entertainment, education and media to become the dominant culture and convert much of the nation and most of its elite.

Second, mass immigration from Asia, Africa and especially Latin America, legal and illegal, changed the ethnic composition of the country.

White Americans, over 90 percent of the electorate in 1968, are down to 70 percent today, and about 60 percent of the population.

And minorities vote 80 percent Democratic.

Third, Republicans in power not only failed to roll back the Great Society but also collaborated in its expansion. Half the U.S. population today depends on government benefits.

Consider Medicare and Social Security, the largest and most expensive federal programs, critical to seniors and the elderly who give Republicans the largest share of their votes.

If Republicans start curtailing and cutting those programs, they will come to know the fate of Barry Goldwater.

Still, whether we have a President Clinton, Trump, Sanders or Cruz in 2017, America appears about to move in a radically new direction.

Foreign policy retrenchment seems at hand. With Trump and Sanders boasting of having opposed the Iraq war, and Cruz joining them in opposing nation-building schemes, Americans will not unite on any new large-scale military intervention. To lead a divided country into a new war is normally a recipe for political upheaval and party suicide.

Understandably, the interventionists and neocons at National Review, Commentary, and the Weekly Standard are fulminating against Trump. For many are the Beltway rice bowls in danger of being broken today.

Second, Republicans will either bring an end to mass migration, or the new millions coming in will bring an end to the presidential aspirations of the Republican Party.

Third, as Sanders has tabled the issue of income equality and wage stagnation, and Trump has identified the principal suspect — trade deals that enrich transnational companies at the cost of American prosperity, sovereignty and independence — we are almost surely at the end of this present era of globalization.

As in the late 19th century, we may be at the onset of a new nationalism in the United States.

A vast slice of the electorate in both parties today is angry — over no-win wars, wage stagnation and millions continuing to pour across our bleeding borders from all over the world. And that slice of America holds both parties responsible for the policies that produced this.

This is what America seems to be saying.

Thus, given the deepening divisions within, as well as between the parties, either an outsider prevails this year, or Balkanization is coming to America, as it has already come to Europe.

For the Sanders, Trump, Cruz and Carson voters, the status quo seems not only unacceptable, but intolerable. And if their candidates and causes do not prevail, they are probably not going to accept defeat stoically, and go quietly into that good night, but continue to disrupt the system until it responds.

Unlike previous elections in our time, save perhaps 1980, this appears to be something of a revolutionary
moment.

We could be on the verge of a real leap into the dark.

Where are we going? One recalls the observation of one Democrat after the stunning and surprise landslide of 1932:

“Well, the American people have spoken, and in his own good time, Franklin will tell us what they have said"

The 2016 Results We Can Already Predict
The battleground states will give you déjà vu.
By LARRY J. SABATO, KYLE KONDIK and GEOFFREY SKELLEY
May 03, 2015
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/2016-predictions-.

20 arrested at North Carolina Legislature protesting GOP's policies
20 arrested at NC Legislature protest
Twenty people are facing trespassing and other charges after members of the "Moral Monday" movement disrupted the North Carolina Senate and House on Wednesday.
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AP
By EMERY P. DALESIO
Wednesday, April 29, 2015 11:17PM
RALEIGH --
Twenty people are facing trespassing and other charges after members of the "Moral Monday" movement disrupted the North Carolina Senate and House on Wednesday to protest Republican policy priorities.
Ten demonstrators were arrested during an evening protest outside the House chambers. Complaints from lawmakers about the loud singing led police to threaten arrest for noise violations.
Earlier, the Senate paused deliberations for about 20 minutes as singing, chanting protesters - most wearing clerical collars - demanded that GOP lawmakers reverse decisions on issues including tax cuts criticized for mostly benefiting big companies and the rich.
Ten protesters were arrested after they kneeled near the brass main doors of the Senate chamber and were charged with violating fire-safety codes or second-degree trespass, according to online county arrest records. Those arrested included David Forbes, the divinity school dean at Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh.
The protesters listed 14 demands including expanded Medicaid coverage, increased public education spending, and a rollback on abortion restrictions. Lawmakers were expected to take up legislation Wednesday that would let more people carry concealed handguns in more places, a move criticized by state NAACP President the Rev. William Barber.
"They would rather give people more access to guns than expand Medicaid," Barber said.
The protests marked two years since the movement's first arrests. The group began protesting after the election of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and an overwhelming GOP legislative majority the previous November. Organizers estimate more than 1,000 have been arrested.
About half the arrested protesters have resolved their cases by agreeing to do community service and pay a modest fee. Almost all the remaining cases were dismissed after the U.S. Supreme Court last June upheld the constitutional rights of people to peacefully assemble and protest government policies by striking down a Massachusetts law limiting protests outside abortion clinics.
The example of civil-disobedience in response to conservative governing has been copied by activists in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and other states.
Republican Party executive director Todd Poole said the demonstrators were acting "under a false cloak" of morality "to push for their radical agenda of bigger government and higher taxes."

I have been out of the country twice this year. The first time, I was in Mexico when protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting death of Michael Brown; more recently, my two weeks in Argentina coincided with nationwide demonstrations against the lack of grand jury indictments in the cases of Brown and Eric Garner, the Staten Island police chokehold victim.
Witnessing a nascent anti-police brutality movement from a distance has given me a different perspective on it, because the novelty of getting out in the streets in America and demanding justice stands in stark contrast to the utter ubiquity of such actions in other parts of the world.
That doesn’t mean such actions always lead to success; in fact, challenging power often fails. But it is a tool in the public’s arsenal, as much as voting or any other civic effort. We have a long way to go in America to rediscover a daily regimen of mass public protest as an altogether normal – indeed, fundamental – component of the rights of citizenship
I found the same commitment to resistance in Mexico. We all know about the movement that has arisen in response to the deaths of 43 student protesters, a case of official corruption and collusion between federal authorities and drug cartels. But behind the headlines, back in August I saw a prominent town square in Jalisco state completely occupied by protesters, who had erected a tent city in opposition to what they called the despotism of the local government. The police had seemingly given up trying to dislodge it. The protesters held a dance party one night, handing out food and literature to the revelers.
We used to have this same belief in America, that street action mattered and needed to be nurtured. From the Boston Tea Party to the civil rights movement, from the Bonus Marchers to the Pullman strikers and many more, America has a rich tradition of uprising against a seemingly immovable political and social apparatus. The right to peaceably assemble is enshrined in the Constitution, even if it largely seems theoretical today.
But sometime between 1776 and now, mass engagement became separated from American political DNA. Like solar panel manufacturing, the United States invented the political protest and then let it wither away while other countries kept it alive. Modern-day demonstrations have evolved into media-friendly one-off events rather than a continuing struggle, a way for people to simply register their dissent without having to sustain it. We hear about the need for a national conversation on race, injustice, violence or economic suffering, but we actually need a daily conversation, an evolving and energizing force of public opposition that those in power cannot easily dismiss.
We’re starting to see this, like a long-dormant volcano sputtering back to life with initial plumes of ash and smoke. The movements in Ferguson and now across the country have become more organized and concentrated. Striking low-wage workers continue to demand the respect that accompanies a living wage and the right to organize. The Moral Monday movement in North Carolina has fused these two pillars of economic and social justice into a coherent whole. Smug intellectuals say that Occupy Wall Street left no legacy amid its demise, but these newer movements come directly out of that commitment to ongoing protest.
These movements have registered modest results, from minimum wage increases in major cities to incremental moves toward reforms to the criminal justice system. But we’re a long way from a time where protest is mundane, ordinary, part of how we engage with our politics. And we need to get there, because organized dissent has historically uplifted virtually every other facet of our civic culture.
I believe this revival of the culture of protest comes out of a belated realization, one that Latin America and other countries had already internalized. They understand that their vote can only go so far, that the entrenched interests who control the social and political infrastructure will only respond to a massive disruption to their smoothly functioning machine. We had a delusion in America that we were somehow exceptional, that we wouldn’t succumb to oligarchy or the control of an ossified elite. We preferred to look the other way when confronted with institutional racism or the rigidities of class. “We’ve gotten better,” we’d tell ourselves. And we gave up the struggle instead of redoubling efforts.
Maybe it took the financial crisis and its sluggish aftermath. Maybe it took a black kid getting shot by the cops to recognize the illegitimacy of the justice system. But there has been some small awakening that we’re not all that exceptional, that our democracy is prone to the same capture we see all around the world, and that we don’t have many options to fix that outside of getting in the street and shouting.
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